The Future of the Digital Estate: Autonomous Endpoint Management 

(Photo: Tech Monitor)

In an age characterised by uncertainty – yet an age where the possibilities of automation and artificial intelligence abound – one thing is becoming clear: it’s time to reconsider the way we think about the management and security of our IT assets. 

That was the underlying message of this recent Tech Monitor video interview focused on the merits of autonomous endpoint management. Produced in association with Tanium and EndpointX, the video featured Dan Jones, Senior Security Advisor EMEA at the former, and Dan Stead, Director at EndpointX. 

The interview featured topics including:

• Challenges and benefits of endpoint automation
• Adoption trends across vertical markets
• The impact of AI on endpoint management
• Future trends and projections

You can watch in full here:

During the discussion, Dan Jones explained that the evolution of endpoint automation reflects an “ever-growing, ever-evolving cyber threat” that human intervention alone cannot meet. As a result, organisations are having to “invest in [a] level of automation – and may need to advance into orchestration and machine learning and … AI – before they are able to get on top of the pressing issues they face every single day.” Jones insisted that “cyber security is a people problem that’s dressed up in technology. If you don’t invest in the technology, you can’t hope to address the people challenges you face, not least of which is that there just aren’t enough of them in frontline roles.”

Jones compared autonomous endpoint management to the self-driving car as applied to your digital estate. “You want to be able to allow the digital estate to take care of itself. How far you go depends on the people and the culture of the organisation.” The appetite of the organisation, in other words, will dictate what it chooses to automate – from patching to updates to user account management to installing software – and to what extend each requires a “human in the loop” .

On the challenges of endpoint management, Stead said that, “historically,” there has been a high barrier to entry, whether it’s coding in a compiled or interpreted language, for example, or investing a lot of time and effort in understanding the syntax of a tool. “That [barrier] has started to ebb away with the introduction of a lot of AI-generated tooling. There has been a democratisation of the process by which people can start to effect change on the estate. But inherent in that is a risk that just because you make it easy to press a button, you still need to know what happens when that button is pressed – and to understand the results.”

Asked why autonomous endpoint management makes sense, Stead argued: “You’re going to improve your cyber hygiene. You’re going to become more efficient [and] free up your employees to spend more of their brain power to do more important things to drive your business forward.”

Asked the same question, Jones said: “This is about the need to build and respond, and have the confidence and certainty in your chosen technologies to really make the investment … in your people a certainty as well. Automation, orchestration and autonomous endpoint management is the only way you’re going to do that.”

To help understand the complexity present within the enterprise – and to plot of path through it –  Tanium has just released a new research report with over 25 of the world’s largest enterprises discussing their real-world, on-the-ground challenges. It includes plenty of insights and shared experience. 

To read ‘The interconnection between people, process, and technology’ – an analyst report from Tanium & Chief Disruptor – click here